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Monday, October 7, 2013

Honesty is the Only Policy

“He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him in minute
entirety and impose him on reality.” –Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

I want to talk a little more about characters, if that’s
alright. I've been thinking a fair bit
about them lately, especially since I've been reading this great comic K.P. turned me on to. Maybe I can get
her to write a review about it sometime when she isn't being crushed by a T.S.
Elliot paper and 100 pages of T.E. Hulme reading. As it stands, she is T.H.E. busy. Anyway . . .

Characters are the vehicles of your story. They aren't just our point of entry into
what’s going on, they are what’s going on.
People want things, and do things, and say things, and feel things, and
we come along for the ride. There are
plenty of short stories in which this is not the case. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas,” Bradbury’s “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains,” and that other one what I can’t remember the name of. Sure.
Short stories, like poetry, are their own animal. There are also books – plenty of fantasy and
sci/fi come to mind – that are much more concerned with the place, or time
period, tech, or magic system, etc . . . If you read either of these genres you can
probably come up with about half a dozen examples off the cuff. But these stories work better, in every
instance, when they have a cast of interesting characters to support them, or
at least competent characters who don’t muddle up our enjoyment of all those
cool protocannons and silicon-nanoid symbiot-suits.

How do you write
compelling characters? That’s a
pretty high level question, and I’m probably never going to be able to explain
it satisfactorily. Let’s save a painful,
technical struggle and just say they have to be dynamic and seem like they actually
inhabit the world you’re writing in.
This place you've put them? They
live there. And their lives spill over
onto the page whenever you’re looking at them, and continue whenever you’re not.

Do not write plot
device characters whose purpose is to move the story along and make things
easier on you. Need a little
tension? Have that crazy character do
something stupidly bad. Want this
character to be endearing? Make that character
terribly obnoxious, and have this character put up with her, or tell her off,
depending. No. Bad writing 101. No.
Your characters need to have their own purpose, irrespective of what
you think you want them to do. They
should make things difficult for you, not easy, because you’ll discover they
want things you hadn't planned on.

First set in stone, no negotiable rule of write club: No one is an expert at this. No one knows all, or even most of what should
happen when they sit down to a new project, or even when they sit down each
subsequent writing day. Plan all you
want, the name of the game is discovery and revision. You try something, it doesn't seem quite
right, it doesn't seem true to the characters, too cheap, too on the nose, or
just uninteresting, what do you do? You
go back and go in a different direction.
But hey, don’t feel bad. Now you
know where not to go. Now maybe you
recognize the next time you start to veer in that direction. This is the hardest part, the admitting to yourself
“I think I've gone the wrong way. I have
to go back. I don’t think this is
it.” But it’s easier if you can say it now
instead of waiting for someone else to say it later. Don’t fret.
You’re a writer. Writers
write. This is what you do. And it’s hard, but it’s also damn fun.

Remember, when it
comes to writing, you’re only wasting time if you’re not . . . or if you’re not
being honest with yourself.